Congress Hits the Snooze Button on Transpo Funding Until May

Closed for the summer. Photo: ##http://politic365.com/2010/07/07/hustling-for-a-senate-seat/##Politic365##

The upper chamber had fought as long as it could to adjust the House transportation bill so it wouldn’t expire when the GOP controls both chambers of Congress. But senators were never willing to actually let the Highway Trust Fund go broke. U.S. DOT would have started cutting back on reimbursements to state DOTs as of today in the absence of an agreement.

After the House rejected the Senate’s amendment yesterday, hours before representatives were due to return to their home districts for the five-week August recess, it seemed the Senate had no choice. Then, news broke that the House was going to stick around a little longer to keep fighting about the border crisis.

Could the Senate have taken advantage of the House’s presence to toss the football back to them, on the assumption that the last team holding it will get blamed for the fumble? Maybe. Maybe the House would have been the one to cave, then. Maybe they would have sent the transportation industry into a tailspin. In a recent poll, 85 percent of transit agencies said they would implement service cuts if that happened.

At least we were spared that. But perhaps not for long. Former U.S. DOT official Beth Osborne, now at Transportation for America, noted that each extension seems to be getting harder. “The easy ways to pay for the program are gone,” she said. “It’s going to get harder doing this with bubble gum and band-aids.”

Who cares?

Last night on Twitter, Cap’n Transit paid me the backhanded compliment of my life by saying:

The Cap’n likens the trust fund apportionment to unjust servings of pie — “Imagine that your dad makes great pie, but you’ve got a selfish older sister who hogs the pie.” You get where this is going. Do you join your piggish sister in lobbying for more pie for her greedy pie-hole (in hopes that your tiny sliver grows too), or do you demand fairer servings of the existing pie?

There is a lot to be said for the Cap’n’s point of view there.

“It’s like, ‘Are we going to shoot ourselves in the foot or are we going to shoot ourselves in the head?’” said Eno Center for Transportation President Joshua Schank, admitting that he, too, finds the current political drama “uninteresting.”

“It’s just so silly and pointless,” Schank said. “The real questions we should be fighting over are how do we pay for it and how do we spend it? And we’re not fighting over those things.”

Osborne adds that it’s hard to have a conversation about radically shifting resources when you’re cutting back. “Reforms come when there’s more money on the table,” she said. “The pot gets bigger and we figure out how to better distribute it.”

Schank also notes that transit relies heavily on federal trust fund money, especially in the most transit-dependent places. “If you didn’t have this program, then the New York City subway is going to start breaking down very fast,” he said. “So if I’m for transit, I don’t know that I would be so quick to discard the program.”

He would, however, transform it radically, relying more on discretionary grant programs paid out of the general fund, and less on formula funding out of the Highway Trust Fund, giving more flexibility to states and localities.

Reformers will keep fighting for a future with a very different balance between roads and transit. That’s why these bills continue to matter, insofar as they present an opportunity to make changes to how transportation is prioritized and funded.

But the next 10 months will be much like the last five years for states, cities and transit agencies that have been trying to operate — and sometimes even grow — in the face of enormous uncertainty.

Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association holds out hope that “maybe there will a little magic at the end of the year,” noting that even though the extended the trust fund through May, Congress doesn’t have to wait till the last minute like they usually do. “They’re at liberty to take it up during the lame duck,” he said.

But the most likely scenario is that the volume gets muted on this conversation until May, when we get to do this whole dance again.

The idea that a Republican controlled Senate and House are going to support current transit and programs like TIGER is utter nonsense. The long term bill that will largely be molded by Vitter is going to be a disaster for transit agencies and will be a clear shot in the head not the foot. Fox will push Obama for a veto and recover some transit funding but it will be nothing like we have today. Guaranteed.

Tanya, you should interview Vitter and hear what he has to say about Transit, that would be the real story 🙂

thegreengrass

Seems responsible.

Alex Brideau III

“when the GOP controls both chambers of Congress”

Don’t you mean “when the GOP *might* control both chambers of Congress”? Or have I missed an election?

94110

Republican plan seems simple: if they control both houses, defund transit and walking completely. If they don’t, democrats have to take the heat for raising taxes.

DD

Vitter wouldn’t be in charge of the transit funding, it would be the Banking committee, so probably Shelby if Republicans take charge.

Bolwerk

Hopefully, but their chances might be well better than 50%. They they weren’t play-with-their-own-poop crazy these days, they’d probably have it in the bag.

chekpeds

I wish the highway trust fund would dry up and surface transportation be returned to city and states , with the accompanying budget. Then, and only then, New York City and many other cities where – soon- 80 % of the US population will live, will cease to be hostage to policies dictated by Texas, Arkansas, Montana or North Dakota. It would make the road lobby work 50 times harder, and let local users dictate where transportation funding goes.
What’s wrong with that ?

chekpeds

After all they want a smaller government… Let’s give it to them and some !

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

The first meeting of the transportation bill conference committee is today at 3:00. (To familiarize yourself with the participants, see Ben’s reports on the House and Senate conferees.) We’ll be live-blogging it, beginning to end. It’s unusual for conferences to meet in public, and leaders have indicated that this won’t be the only meeting they have in front of television […]

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) allied with House Democrats today. (Photo: UPI) The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will move tomorrow on a White House-backed extension of the four-year-old federal transportation law, but at least one of its members is already opposed. George Voinovich (R-OH) linked arms with House Democratic leaders on the transportation panel […]

For the past six months, I have had the enviable task (seriously) of tracing the path of federal transportation legislation through Congress. And look how far we’ve come! When I first took the editor’s chair in January, transportation funds were drying up, the deadline for a new bill was fast approaching, and none of the news […]

For the 112th Congress, the path to passing a new transportation bill has been full of starts and stops, partisan politics and low expectations. While Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently said he doesn’t expect a multi-year bill to pass this Congress, livable streets advocates should still be on alert in the weeks ahead. Momentum is […]

Congress returns from a monthlong recess — oh sorry, “district work period” — next Wednesday. Before September 30, they’ll have to figure out next steps for keeping the transportation program going, assuming there’s no way that the two chambers will come to an agreement about a long-term bill before the current extension expires. Both houses […]

With just two work days left before the federal transportation funding source dips into the red, Congress is moving toward a high-stakes showdown over how to close the gap. Yesterday the Senate passed a bill to transfer $8 billion from the general fund to the Highway Trust Fund, which would keep things running until December […]